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For over 20 years, Internet businesses have grown under the protection of a special law that provides extraordinary privileges. This law has properly been hailed as a boon to innovation, and has become enshrined in some quarters as an indispensable pillar of free speech. However, no law regarding technology can survive the merciless rule of unintended consequences; what was once a necessary sanctuary has become a virtual menace to society. If you wonder how the United States has reached the brink of electing a deplorable villain as its leader, at least part of the answer rests with the Internet’s most generous law.

This law is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. The bulk of the act was a misguided attempt to regulate “indecent” content on the Internet, most of which was rightfully struck down by the Supreme Court in the name of the First Amendment. But Section 230 was a special provision inserted late in the legislative process, out of concern that nascent Internet businesses would drown in legal liability for statements made by others. Section 230 states:

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

This is a shield from libel and defamation suits, an amazing advantage in the rise of the new media of the Internet. The impetus for this law came from a 1995 case where an Internet service provider was found liable for defamatory statements made by a user of its message board. The court’s reasoning included the fact that the Internet service had exercised some editorial control over some of the message board content; therefore the service could be treated as the publisher of all the content, just as a newspaper would be.

In 1995, this was a horrific decision made by technology-illiterate judges who had no understanding of the power and potential of the Internet. It would be nice to think that the Congressmen who inserted Section 230 into the CDA were blessed with extraordinary foresight into the future of technology. But no – actually they just wanted to be sure that Internet companies would be willing to help hide boobies.

Remember, the bulk of the CDA was an insane Sisyphean effort to stop the spread of pornography on the Internet. Internet providers were rightly concerned that they would never be able to stop all the boobies. They argued that the 1995 case showed that any failed attempt to censor boobies would be interpreted as editorial control, holding them liable for all the boobies that did get through. So these Congressman inserted Section 230 as a way of saying to companies “Hey, just try your best to censor boobies, you won’t be held liable as a publisher of the boobies that did get through.” Internet companies, even in 1995, were smarter than Congressmen. Although the CDA was about as effective at reducing pornography on the Internet as a cocktail umbrella in a hailstorm, Section 230 emerged from this fragile legislation as an enduring and invaluable shield against liability. Now you can’t sue Facebook for publishing information that is verifiably false and harmful. Lives can be destroyed on the sites we live on, and those sites will never be held responsible.

The EFF says Section 230 is “one of the most valuable tools for protecting freedom of expression and innovation on the Internet” and ACLU says that this law “defines Internet culture as we know it.” These eminent bastions of free speech have been tremendous warriors for a lot of good in our society, but like anyone else, they could not predict the future and they may cling too long to brittle ideas that are past their expiration date. When Section 230 was adopted, the Internet was the Wild West, the new American frontier for development. There were no dominant Internet companies. The law was written with Prodigy and CompuServe in mind; AOL was the up-and-comer, Yahoo was barely a year old. The media lifeblood of the nation were the three broadcast networks, the New York Times and the Washington Post, and the many local newspapers throughout the country. People who understood the Internet then were rightly concerned about legal liability crushing the industry in its infancy.

We live in a very different world today. Network effects make some large portions of the Internet into a winner-take-all game where the behemoths can quickly grow into billion-dollar enterprises, affecting billions of lives daily. Traditional media is dead and dying, a boon to experimentation and diversity, but a blow to authority and truth. Technologists were proud to disintermediate and destroy the old gatekeepers, but we engaged in this merry destruction without any thought to the vital purpose that the Fourth Estate served in our politics. And now we live in a nation where most days it seems like the only people who don’t believe the next president could be a racist, misogynist, fascist despot are the ones who believe she could be an acceptably corrupt continuation of a broken political system.

The gatekeepers are dead and most people only get their news from their friends and others in the same echo chamber on Facebook. Our public discourse is conducted on Twitter, where online harassment by anonymous, cowardly sexists and racists is treated as an acceptable form of free speech. And we are still, as we always are in technology, only at the beginning of our problems. I don’t know where this is going any better than lawmakers did in 1996; I don’t have a solution – but I do think we should take the thumb off the scales that favor Internet businesses.

A similar situation occurred with respect to state sales taxes. In a 1992 case, the Supreme court ruled that businesses with no physical presence in a state did not have to collect sales tax in that state. Amazon exploited this ruling, carefully building its business to avoid having to impose state sales taxes, giving it an advantage over local businesses. By 2012, Amazon saw the writing on the wall, and began “voluntarily” collecting sales tax in many more states than it had previously done. But by that time, the West had been won: Amazon was the dominant online retailer, and Main Street businesses had been all but destroyed. Amazon had the foresight to act ahead of the change in the laws, which is coming anyway. I fear our dominant Internet services lack the moral courage to act in the interests of our country.

Facebook and Twitter are our new public square, and although they are private businesses they should not be exempt from the laws and social requirements of other businesses that regularly gather large groups of people together. No shopping mall, for example, would allow the public posting of verifiably untrue, insane ramblings, not without damage to their business as well as legal liability. No sporting venue would allow its women to be spit on, its minorities to be subject to vile racist invective, without losing business and facing lawsuits. And yet we allow our most significant public gatherings online to be completely free of the obligations of being a publisher, obligations that supported the kind of media that have been vital to our proper functioning politics.

The internet destroyed vast portions of traditional media that depended on fact, truth and integrity. This hasn’t been solely a triumph of progress and free market principles, it has been a creative destruction assisted by a sweetheart deal with the government. Under this mantle of government protection, technology companies replaced essential elements of democracy with endless misinformation, lies and insanity. Free speech should allow much of this to be possible, but those who would build a business on irresponsible dissemination of speech should be subject to the same laws as the businesses that they destroyed. It’s time to take the training wheels off of Internet culture. Section 230 of the CDA should be repealed.

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Wired UK just published a pair of articles that are a great explication of the potential of Virtual Reality to become as powerful as the Web. They fairly report the vision that Philip Rosedale has been pursuing for most of his professional lifetime. My one-sentence summaries:

Second Life was just the beginning – Philip wanted to connect the world in a seamless 3D environment, but was greatly limited by technology of the time; today many of these limitations are lifting.

VR and the CD-ROM – People are most excited about closed VR experiences today, but this is like being excited about Encarta on CD-ROM before people understood how powerful Wikipedia would become.

Good articles; read them if you are interested in VR. I have just one, entirely personal, embarrassingly picayune, totally irrelevant problem …

The first article says: “Then, in 2006, Second Life stopped growing.”

I know this to be untrue. I ran finance for SL from 2005-2006, and remained on the exec team until I left the company in 2009. We raised money in 2006, and I personally prepared the financial projections that predicted our growth through 2008. Financial projections for startups are notoriously optimistic, which is to say they are mostly composed of fairy dust and bullshit. I was surprised as anyone to notice, in 2008, that my projections of fast growth held up, quarter over quarter, with a margin of error of no more than 10% (and even at that, the projection was usually lower than actual growth). So I know that SL was still growing quite well in 2006, in every meaningful aspect of usage and business metrics. The growth rate slowed in 2008, but absolute growth was still positive in 2009 when I left. Yes, SL did stop growing eventually. But not on my watch.

Ok, that’s prideful, and it’s petty. But it’s fair to say that I’m the single most authoritative source in the world on this topic. So when I read the article, I sent a note to the reporter with a correction. He replied that he’d “check it out.” A day later, he said that he followed up and he seems to be right, and cited an article by another reporter.

That is seriously annoying. The other reporter has no better access to the facts than the original reporter. That other reporter is just another source of rumor and speculation. In this case, I am the actual source of truth, and the reporter with access to the truth chose to ignore it!

Obviously, this is trivial. Who cares? No one but me and my wounded pride. But it’s frightening to consider how easily reporters will ignore the truth when it gets in the way of their own goals.

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Daisy went upstairs to wash her face – too late I thought with humiliation of my towels – while Gatsby and I waited on the lawn.

This is a beautiful bit of technique, I just want to deconstruct it very carefully. We’ve just come out of one of the most emotionally intense moments in the book, the reunion of Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan, the goal of Gatbsy’s years-long quest finally realized. This scene has taken place off-stage, from narrator Nick’s perspective, as he departed his own house in order to give the couple privacy. So Nick has been standing in the rain on his modest little lawn for half an hour, the lawn that Nick had allowed to grow shaggy and unkempt until that morning, when Gatsby had sent his landscaper around for a proper mowing.

Now Nick re-enters his house to see Daisy’s face shining with happy tears, Gatsby relaxed and composed where before the meeting he’d been a nervous wreck. Whatever happened in that half hour had been full of painful joy. Daisy goes to clean up, the men wait. Such a simple action, it could have passed by without any further flourish. But Fitzgerald takes this opportunity to show us the reflexive thought that enters Nick’s head, a simple and true statement that he’s embarrassed that he forgot to do something about his dingy towels in the upstairs bath. It reveals the kind of person Nick is, his class concerns, the ever-present impulse of self-judgment that resides within him as surely as his heartbeat.

The narrative of this novel is about Gatsby and Daisy, but the genius of it is that the story is about Nick. We learn nearly nothing about the interior lives of the purported main couple. But we learn everything about Nick in these stealthily delivered injections of perspective.

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I’m proud to be an American, always have been. What I’ve always loved about this country is that the truest test of citizenship is about ideas, not history or genealogy. The USA is special in this way, that you can be most authentically American by internalizing and adhering to certain ideals. You can’t become more French by reading Sartre, more Irish by drinking whiskey, or more Korean by eating kimchee. In nearly all countries, the strongest claim to belonging is made by tracing family lineage. Only in America can you make an insuperable claim to belonging merely by believing the right things.

Though a popular view, the idea that the United States is special in this way is strongly disputed in academic circles. “American exceptionalism” is regarded as a naive worldview that has served primarily as a rationalization for imperialism, discrimination and arrogance. While I don’t agree with that critique, I have finally come to understand that the American experiment has always included genocide, and always will. The nature of pursuing ideals above all apparently includes the plowing of actual humans into the ground like so much fertilizer.

There’s no disputing that the establishment of this country by European settlers included the genocide of Native Americans. There’s no way of excusing such carnage; the best anyone can say is that the founding of the nation in blood was regrettable but unavoidable. As if one original sin weren’t enough, our country additionally built its economic strength on the backs of slavery, perhaps the most profitable genocide in history, one that continues to pay dividends to some privileged classes up to this very day.

This carnage can’t be defended. We can only promise to do better in the future. In looking ahead, we try to draw a through line to the past, saying that our nation was founded on the correct ideas, those of liberty and equality, freedom and justice. Although only a very few truly participated in the American ideal at the start, the course of bloody history has painfully expanded the benefits as we’ve expanded our understanding of common humanity. The most charitable view is that we’ve always had the right ideals, but the challenge has always been improving our implementation. “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

The hope is, I suppose, that each successive genocide is less bloody than the last.

Fleeing Europeans established this country by killing Native Americans. Early Americans grew the country with the slavery of Africans. We are getting closer and closer to a country where our ideals are truly extended to African-Americans, along with previously disenfranchised and disadvantaged women and LBGT people, immigrants and religious adherents of all kinds and creeds. Life is getting better for everyone, on average. And though our conflicts may be impassioned, they are no longer openly murderous. Perhaps genocide is no longer part of the cycle of the American experiment.

But as life gets better for everyone on average, it gets worse for some in particular. Now it seems that many male Americans of European heritage, in losing their privilege, are suffering a kind of slow death. “Genocide” may be too dramatic a term, held too dear by those who have suffered the most from it. But we can still talk about death, we can see that the greatest increase in suicide rate in recent years is among uneducated white male Americans. Here is a class of people who will slowly lose everything they hold dear.

And who will miss it – when what they hold dear is so often tribalism, jingoism, racism, all manner of deplorable -isms – doesn’t such savagery deserve extinction? They deserve to be left behind, for they are malformed and often malicious, substandard and nearly subhuman … Never mind that these are the same judgments that “true” Americans have always made in the name of reforming this nation ever closer to the deathless ideals. Let’s ignore the echoes of of our bloody past, for this time we are so sure we are right.

That is the price of progress, we say, those of us who are on the winning side of the historical moment. Like every other set of Americans who believed that the evolution of our country requires regrettable-but-unavoidable bloodshed, we believe that this is the last forced extinction of a way of life. Once the deplorables are finally put in their place, surely we will have justice for all.

Is there an end to the American experiment? What would that look like? American ideals may outlive America. The institutions of statehood may only be a temporary infrastructure in the eternal pursuit of abstract ideals. For example, democracy outlived and evolved long beyond the historical city-state of Athens.

Stranger still would be an end involving expanded recognition of consciousness. There have long been a tiny minority of people who would extend consciousness and its attendant rights to certain animals, or even plants. If this notion ever becomes mainstream, what are the consequences to expanding American ideals to all conscious beings? More fantastically and yet more plausibly, what will happen when machines have processing capability such that their operations are indistinguishable from human consciousness? Our notions of liberty and equality, freedom and justice, even the pursuit of happiness, may continue to become increasingly abstract, until these ideals are no longer be tethered to any particular people, or to any people at all.

The repeated refrain in the American songbook is the collapse of the way of life of those who thought they controlled the music. Custer had his last stand. The South lost the Civil War, and really isn’t rising again. MLK Jr. is more alive than his assassins, Trumpism is the last gasp of a dying breed. Today we seem to be in yet another war for the soul of our nation. No matter who emerges as the victor, I doubt it will be the last.

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God I hate tech hyperbole. And I literally hate the use of “literally” to mean its opposite … but let me explain how bad technology product management can literally lead to the end of the world.

Donald Trump represents an existential threat to humanity. To put such a man at the helm of the world’s most powerful nation is like handing over the controls of a nuclear submarine to a petulant baby. That’s a poor simile only because it’s not an analogy but a nearly literal description.

What can I do about this? I’m just one person, one vote. Moreover, I’m in California, which will surely vote Clinton anyway, so my vote won’t sway the outcome. I could advocate, I could preach to everyone around me, but really most of the people in physical proximity to me already agree with me.

What about technology? I’m in the center of Silicon Valley, I know me some techmology, can’t I do something wizardly to extend the power of a single voice? Nope. I mean, I can write this little essay, and maybe my fifty readers will like it, but those fifty people and everyone they’ll share it with already agree with me.

But about twenty miles from here, there are a couple of dozen people who literally hold the fate of our political conversation in their hands. In fact, it’s been in their hands for quite some time now, and they’ve made decisions which, only in retrospect, appear to have been disastrous for our nation’s politics.

At Facebook, the News Feed is the main stream of information that people see when they use the service. It has become the single most important source of news and conversation for many if not most Americans. It is designed to show people information that they want, which largely means showing people what they already agree with, from people who they already are inclined to sympathize with.

At Google, the search results page answers billions of queries each day, from billions of people. The results are carefully shaped not just with regard to each query, but as much as possible conformed for the particular user, so that the user seesresults they are more likely to want to click, which in essence means showing them information they already agree with.

I’m not the first to note that the creation of these echo chambers only serves to reinforce existing biases, and isolate people from diverse opinions that could broaden their horizons and enrich our society. I might be among the first to charge that the product managers who now lead Facebook News Feed and Google Search are failing at their jobs.

On its face that’s a ridiculous statement, as we are talking about two of the most successful products in history, literal world changers. And who could argue against the general strategy of conforming experience to user tastes? But there comes a time in the life cycle of even massively successful products, when the product has attained a use and effect that were never anticipated through all of the prior success. Product managers who do not grapple with what their products have become, in all dimensions, are not doing their jobs well.

News Feed and Search are unique in landscape of all products. These are no longer simply things that people use, and therefore need to be designed to be as pleasant and popular as possible. These products now form the infrastructure of political conversation, they have become the backbone of our polity, they are the means by which citizens of our nation engage with each other on the essential ideas of community. The success of these products must now be judged on how well they serve beneficial outcomes in our society, especially our politics.

There are plenty of people at Facebook and Google who are deeply invested in denying this responsibility, which is so self-evident to all of the rest of us mere users. They would like to say that their products are designed to be “neutral,” to simply follow algorithms that have no sense of society or humanity. They want to hide their power behind obfuscating explanations of math and probability.

Some of this may be a difference in perspective. Some of this may be benign short-sightedness. But some of it is moral cowardice. I hate to make such an inflammatory charge, but when you have the ability to shape a product in a way that would reduce the likelihood of a fascist from taking the reins of a country with the firepower to end life as we know it, and you deny that you have this power, I have a hard time calling this anything other than what it is.

Facebook and Google know that their products contribute to a stifled political conversation that only hardens lines of hate and allows well-meaning people to isolate themselves in their own safe spaces. Will they continue to build their products in a way that divides our society? Or will they take real moral responsibility for how their products shape our political conversation, and make their products a conduit for uncomfortable ideas that could improve our world? Will they break down the barriers between hardened positions, expose ignorance to truth, measure hatred and inject love? Or will they claim that these goals are too soft, and anyway achieving them is too hard?

When Philip Morris discovered that their product was killing their customers, they hid the evidence for as long as they could, and they denied the truth even after it was apparent to everyone else, all so they could squeeze out the last dollars from their death-dealing empire. When Coca-Cola realized that sugary drinks were contributing to unprecedented rates of obesity, they diversified their product lines to include healthy drinks as well as sugar bombs – not exactly admirable, but at least preparing for a shift where people who could watch out for themselves would continue to contribute to the company’s bottom line. At this point, I would be okay with lesser evils, but I would prefer to see moral courage. Product managers at Facebook News Feed and Google Search: Do Your Jobs.

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I began writing this in the morning of July 7, disheartened by the killing of Philando Castile, struggling to make sense of this ongoing slaughter of black lives. I have a lot of respect for law enforcement as well, and I wondered how we will rebalance the scales of justice to make a better world. I sat down to write that Black vs Blue is a literal tradeoff of lives, not just a one-sided injustice, and it will only get worse if both sides cannot explicitly acknowledge this. Then I paused my writing, checked the news, and saw that it’s already gotten worse. I won’t change anything I’ve written so far, and I’ll call out where I paused and restarted …

#BlackLivesMatter is the apotheosis of hashtags, arguably the mark of separation between the Internet as merely united information and the Internet as truly united culture. Uniting the world doesn’t happen with the ties that bind – those ties were always there, if we had the eyes and heart to see and feel them. Unity comes with a force implacable enough to sink us if we can’t acknowledge what’s been there all along.

In dusty eons past, the world’s knowledge was stored on fragile dried plant pulp, stacked up in schools, libraries, churches and palaces, separated by uncrossable oceans, vast and hostile distances. Fast-forward a few centuries and everything is instantly connected, world knowledge is united, human progress progresses in a coordinated manner that, if not moving in lockstep yet, fairly resembles loosely bound rafts strapped together on a common ocean. At the bleeding edge of the modern evolution of common knowledge, participants in the exchange of information must form a common culture, at least to the extent they are forced to deal with the vast gulf that yet remains between us all despite swimming in the same waters. #BlackLivesMatter is the iceberg that must be reckoned with, ignore it at the peril of having our boats wrecked by the rocky mass underwater. It is a call for the absorption of information at first, but more deeply it is a call to grapple with history, with the experiences of another, with the immediate reaction and grief, the defensiveness and guilt, the raw emotions of others all paddling in different directions to pull our own rafts out of the way of the iceberg, futilely ignoring the unbreakable ropes that bind us together.

… I am hoping that high-falutin’, fantastically florid introduction has gotten rid of the idiots, before I get to the point, if there is one. Because I’m not engaging with the #AllLivesMatter or #WhiteLivesMatter crowd. As entertaining as it can be to methodically unpack the ignorance, fear, guilt and willful blindness of those reactionary hashtags, they are nothing more than the impotent flags flown atop the largest rafts whose inhabitants see the iceberg and ignore it, not seeing that the ropes between the rafts are indeed unbreakable, and no hull or armor will protect their own raft from the sharp rocks beneath the water. #AllLivesMatter and #WhiteLivesMatter are false flags to be ignored. #BlackLivesMatter is the iceberg.

But #BlueLivesMatter is not so easily dismissed, although its standard bearers can seem similar to the false flag brigade, in being across such a great divide of cultural understanding that the good instinct to dismiss false flags casts its shadow over this hashtag as well. And a call to value police lives seems absurd as we watch, over and over again, the deaths of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Laquan McDonald, Akai Gurley, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile … at this point the despair of listing so many names is swamped by the certainty that we need wait only weeks to add another to the list. The volume of clear police crime and misbehavior may lead one to believe that #BlueLivesMatter only defends individual and institutional racism, corruption, appalling training and criminal collusion.

Hashtags, like people, aren’t monolithic. Different people mean different things when they post, tweet, instashare, snapblog, or whatever we do to cry our digital tears in the electronic ether. But in the best interpretation of #BlueLivesMatter, it really does spring from a concern for life, and there are the utmost consequences for the lives that will be affected when #Black meets #Blue. For #BlackLivesMatter to be given its full due, #BlueLivesMatter will have to make the ultimate sacrifice in some instances.

The question here is how to share the burden of mistakes. On my best days, I can imagine a world without racism (or at least, without the level of racism that directly or indirectly leads to death), as idealistic and distant as that world may be. But I can’t imagine a world without mistakes, which are so fundamental to the human condition, and necessary to human progress, that we ought to fear a world without mistakes more than one with racism.

So in a world with mistakes, where we also have deadly weapons and criminals, unless we want criminals to be able to kill with impunity, we must have police or accept vigilantes. And if you have police in this world, some of them must be armed, and some of them will make mistakes. (I suppose we can imagine a world without deadly weapons, or one without criminals, but if all we do is imagine a world without problems, there isn’t much to discuss.) So the police will make mistakes involving deadly weapons, and someone will die as a result. Who should it be, an innocent suspect, or an innocent police officer or bystander?

#BlueLivesMatter says that the innocent suspect must die. This sounds horrible, but it isn’t hard to envision math that makes this seem rational. Say there are 1000 life-or-death suspect vs police confrontations per year. Say that 10% of those confrontations will end in a mistake, so we count up the number of lives at stake as something like:

100 suspects

300 police officers

500 bystanders

Again, we are assuming that all of these actions will be a police mistake, but we’re not yet deciding where the burden of mistakes lies. Let’s say that the mistake in every instance is that the police show up and start shooting – they shoot all of the suspects (100), 10% of the bystanders (50), and 5% of the cops (15). That’s 165 dead, all of them innocent.

Now let’s say that instead, the mistake is that the cops never shoot. They’re unarmed, or even if they are armed, they never unholster. But again, this is a fatal mistake. In this type of mistake, the suspects are not innocent, so all of the cops and bystanders die. That’s 800 innocent dead.

Obviously, this is not the actual data – the point here isn’t to examine the data, but to question the concept. If #BlueLivesMatter is saying that they’d rather see innocent suspects die than innocent police and bystanders, that is not an argument that can be dismissed conceptually. It is at least worthy of discussion. An informed discussion would require actually examining the data. It is wrong to say that #BlueLivesMatter is a conceptually nonsensical response to #BlackLivesMatter, as we can say about #AllLivesMatter and #WhiteLivesMatter. #BlueLivesMatter has conceptual integrity, but lacks data.

Coming out of the conceptual world and back to reality: much of the data that would be needed is never collected, and probably can’t be reliably collected. How exactly do you count lives saved? How exactly do you count mistakes made by police inaction? In addition, the sad reality is that many elements of police culture are devoted to hiding what little data we might have. And then the truly despairing reality is that in the vast majority of innocent suspects who are killed, the victim is black, and some of those killings are less properly characterized as mistakes than as manifestations of direct and institutional racism.

This is where I paused. Check news. Eleven officers shot, four confirmed dead. What the fuck was I doing in the conceptual world? What the fuck is happening in the real world? Where the fuck is all this heading?

#BlackLivesMatter demands that we reduce the slaughter of innocent black lives, without explicitly recognizing the treacherous mass of iceberg beneath the surface. In a somewhat more perfect world, one without racism but still with crime and guns and deadly mistakes, to reduce the killing of one set of innocents will increase the killing of another another set. We don’t know if the tradeoff is 1-for-1, 10-for-1, or 1-for-10; we’ve never seen the data and may not be able to get it. But if police officers are trained to be slower on the draw, to err on the side of caution, that means that they must be trained such that more police officers will die. Maybe it’s worth it. Maybe 1000 innocent black lives will be saved in return for 1 police officer’s death. But what do you say to that one police officer’s family?

It’s easy to object, “Well how about we just get rid of racism in the police force first, and then go from there? No one here is asking cops to die, dummy!”

Get rid of racism in the police force? Do you have a formula for that? How about we get rid of racism in the classroom, in the workplace, in the legislature, in the entire world while we’re at it? We don’t know how to do this within a group of kindergarten kids, how are we going to do this for the more than 1 million police officers in the United States? Why do police officers bear the responsibility for curing racism more than any other group, how can we ask them to sacrifice even one of their own?

This is not to say that we can do nothing. Of course we can. Of course there is better training, better hiring, better testing, better evaluation, better management. And when there is still racism, there can be better recognition, better correction, better enforcement and true and swift punishment. Nevertheless the package of all of those things is going to mean, in addition to less racism and sundry other benefits: more caution. Saving innocent black lives is about changing the balance of mistakes. It is about erring on the side of caution so that fewer innocent black lives are ended – and it therefore also means that some more innocent blue lives must end.

This is a mortal conflict. It is black lives against blue lives, there must be a tradeoff. I don’t know where the tradeoff is, and although we don’t have sufficient data, I feel we will need to act without all of the data in order to prevent greater carnage. Because if advocates, thought leaders, legislators, and well-meaning citizens on both sides don’t admit this is a mortal trade-off, and make the hard decisions to force those trade-offs, then the formula will continue to get worse. More lives will be lost on every side.

More innocent black men will die. In response, there will be more outrage. We no longer live in a world where this outrage can be suppressed by a combination of obfuscation, brutality and social pressure. It will only grow until there is outright war in the streets. And here is where we are now. Two innocent black men dead this week. Four innocent blue lives ended in Dallas today. This isn’t slowing down, it isn’t blowing over, it isn’t getting better.

That’s all I can manage right now, an uncharacteristically unedited dump of thoughts. #Black vs #Blue is an ever-growing river of red.

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Donald Trump is going to be the next President of the United States. And technology is to blame. If you disagree with either of those statements, you just haven’t been paying attention.

Why is Trump about to win the Republican nomination? Do you blame ignorance, stupidity, racism, sheer anger? Do you blame the cynicism and greed of the Republican party over the last 30 years? All of these answers are rooted in an ungenerous assumption about the many millions of voters who have voted for Trump and will continue to do so. You would be saying that these people are fools, ignoramuses, racists. I think that is wrong substantively, but I know for sure that is wrong for you as a person. Always choose to be generous and empathetic in your assumptions about people, so long as that serves you just as well as your lesser instincts toward mean-spirited judgment.

The generous and empathetic view here accepts that the political system of this country is incontrovertibly broken for the majority of people. And since this country is ostensibly a democracy, that majority is understandably willing to vote for the person that most loudly claims that they will revolutionize the existing system. Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, taken together, represent the vast majority of this country’s voters.

Trump won his party’s nomination (and Bernie will not) because Trump received billions and billions of dollars worth of free advertising. In a democracy, getting the message out to the people is the fundamental lubricant of the polity, which is why for nearly all of our nation’s history, the media have been regarded as the Fourth Estate, an equal peer to our functioning government alongside the executive, legislative and judicial branches.

But in the last twenty years, intensified in the last decade, the media have undergone a tremendous upheaval, all wrought by technology. And here is where we, all of us in technology, have been so proud of how we shaped the future, so unbearably, insufferably proud. We were proud to destroy Old Media, to disintermediate the gatekeepers, to revel in the creative destruction. Pride goeth before the fall.

What we didn’t realize, didn’t take seriously, is the real value of media as an institution in a properly functioning democracy, the Fourth Estate that keeps the others honest. We destroyed the gatekeepers without any foresight that we were replacing them with monsters much more insidious: the tyranny of the click, the plutocracy of the pageview, merciless metrics. Technology has become a dominant force in our culture over the last twenty years, and we as technologists were wholly unprepared for the responsibility.

If you think Hillary Clinton is going to win the general election, you have an optimism that is wholly unsupported by the slow-motion train wreck that has unfolded before our eyes these last few months. What could possibly support that optimism? Would you deny the obvious truth that this is a representative democracy, and that the majority of voters have stated their preference for overthrowing the current system? Hillary is a creature of the system, she cannot win over those voters.

The only hope is that the will of the majority will become disengaged from this election. They will not do so in the face of the billions and billions and more billions of free advertising that the media will continue to lavish upon Trump because they are no longer gatekeeping bastions of the Fourth Estate, but slaves to the clicks and advertising dollars that the technology revolution have left to them as the only form of viability that they have left. Believing that Hillary Clinton will win the presidency is like believing the New York Times is still The Paper of Record.